Europe may seem to have its mojo back, but old problems still haunt the continent | Hans Kundnani | Opinion

Europe may seem to have its mojo back, but old problems still haunt the continent | Hans Kundnani | Opinion

In the last few months, there has been a new optimistic â€" or even triumphalist â€" mood in much of Europe. At the beginning of the year, many feared that the populist wave that seemed to have engulfed Britain and the United States in 2016 would reach continental Europe.

In particular, the nightmare scenario was that Marine Le Pen would become French president, which could have meant the end of the eurozone or even the European Union itself. But since Emmanuel Macron came out of nowhere to win the French presidential election in May, promising economic reform and a reinvigorated Franco-German “tandem”, there is now a sense that Europe has bounced back.

The hope is that Europe has seen off the threat of populism, not least because Europeans want nothing to do with Donald Trump. And with Britain in chaos, it is now the last redoubt of the “liberal international order” and even of the west itself. The optimism is supported by economic data, in particular, the eurozone unemployment rate has now fallen below 10% for the first time since the euro crisis began.

But just as the narrative of a populist wave was flawed, so is the new narrative that Europe is back. “Pro-Europeans” like to point to polls that suggest that enthusiasm for the EU has increased since Brexit. The problem is that the resurgence of support for EU membership is largely based on fear. Continental Europeans look at the difficulties in the UK, trying to extricate itself from the EU, and know it would be infinitely more complicated for a eurozone country. (That many “pro-Europeans” cannot see this â€" or do not care â€" illustrates how much ends and means have become confused in the EU.)

Meanwhile, the problems that the EU has struggled with for the last seven years since the euro crisis began, and that have led to the increase in euroscepticism, remain unresolved. The multiple overlapping fault lineswithin the EU remain as deep as ever, as was illustrated when, shortly after being elected, Macron accused central and eastern Europe countries of treating the EU “as a supermarket”. The EU has also done little to help Italy cope with another wave of refugees from Africa, thousands of whom are now dying in the Mediterranean.

The economic and institutional questions around the eurozone remain the most important for the future of the EU. At the centre of this is the conflict between French and German visions of the economy and of the single currency. Merkel has indicated a willingness to take further steps to turn the eurozone into a “fiscal union”, as argued for by Macron, in particular the creation of a new post of eurozone finance minister. But whereas to the French this means risk sharing in the eurozone, to Germans it means the creation of mechanisms to enforce eurozone fiscal rules.

The political establishment in Berlin wants Macron to succeed â€" they realise that if he doesn’t, Le Pen could become president in 2022 â€" and wants to support him. “The shock of Brexit and Trump was so great that there is a realisation that Germany can’t treat Macron the way it treated Hollande,” says Jana Puglierin of the German Council on Foreign Relations. However, many in Berlin worry about the costs to them of any deal with France. So although they hope Macron succeeds in reforming the French economy, they think there is little they can or should do to help.

For the first time since the beginning of the euro crisis, the German Social Democrats are offering a real alternative to Merkel’s approach, but they are almost certain to lose the general election that takes place in September. That could mean Merkel is in effect re-elected with a mandate to say no to Macron.

She could, of course, reject the wishes of German voters and go ahead and make concessions to Macron; after all, she is unlikely to stand for election again in 2021 and will no doubt be thinking about her legacy. But there is little in her track record to suggest she will go against public opinion in this way or to suggest that she even agrees that a compromise with France is needed to save Europe.

In some respects, things are not just no better, but actually worse than they were before the election of Trump. In particular, that is because of the way that the uncertainty about the US security guarantee that Trump has created makes Europeans suddenly much more vulnerable â€" and because it is difficult to see how Europeans can respond to this new vulnerability.

The political establishment in Berlin wants Macron to succeed

Since the election of Trump, EU member states have pushed ahead with plans to integrate security and defence policy. In June, they created a European defence fund, which will increase research and development spending and co-ordinate defence procurement. But such incremental steps are nowhere near enough and, in any case, are meant to complement, rather than replace, Nato. No one will admit that documents such as the EU “global strategy”, published a few days after the Brexit referendum last year and before the election of Trump, are now obsolete.

Merkel’s statement at a rally in Bavaria in May that Europeans can no longer “completely depend on others” and “have to take our fate into our own hands” has been seen by many as a kind of European declaration of independence. The problem is that Europeans are not prepared to do what it would take to become genuinely independent â€" they remain either unable or unwilling to make the kind of necessary dramatic increase in defence spending.

Here again, Germany is the problem. It is not just that its own defence spending remains low â€" since the Ukraine crisis it has begun to increase defence spending, but will not reach the Nato target of 2% of GDP before 2024 â€" it is also that the eurozone fiscal rules on which Germany insists and the austerity it has imposed on other eurozone countries make it difficult for them to increase defence spending sufficiently either.

The reality is that in order to achieve “strategic autonomy”, in other words, to become genuinely independent of the United States in terms of security, EU member states would probably need to spend much more than 2% of GDP.

It is therefore hard to see the current optimism in Europe as anything but escapism â€" understandable escapism, perhaps, given the shocks of Brexit and the election of Trump, but escapism nonetheless.

Hans Kundnani is a senior transatlantic fellow at the German Marshall Fund and author of The Paradox of German Power

قالب وردپرس

Tweet

Subscribe to receive free email updates: